I could easily say I enjoyed writing during my years in high school. My favorite type of essay to write was actually a research essay. I liked researching a topic and putting what I learned on paper so someone else could learn about it too. This was especially enjoyable when there weren’t many guidelines for your topic and I could choose one I was genuinely interested in. I also didn’t mind comparing and contrasting topics, assuming they were topics I found interesting. But there were also several types of essays I enjoyed much less. I had to write a lot of essays about books we read as a class. I would have enjoyed this if I appreciated the books we read, but most of them seemed irrelevant. What I learned most in high school is how to organize my essays. High school also helped a great deal with my skills in organizing paragraphs and putting them in an order that makes sense. I also believe high school writing classes helped me with my spelling and grammar. I would have liked to learn more about what is expected of you in college. I am worried my teachers in high school may not have prepared me for all the writing I have to do at a college level. I thought it would be a good idea to take an english class starting out as a freshman to gain some writing skills needed in other courses. I expect this class will help me with writing strategies in my classes now, and in the next four years.
I have never been one to jump up and down about a research paper but I too love the idea of transforming information into a digestible form so that someone else may benefit or learn from what I have researched. Hopefully any research papers we do in this course will allow for us to choose or topic. I'm not sure if you all at your high school received the chance to choose your own topics, did you? Because unfortunately, at one of my high schools, all of our topics were predetermined which would explain our lack of enthusiasm towards research papers.
ReplyDeleteI also benefitted from learning how to organize and structure my writing in high school. Although at times I got frustrated with having to follow the guidelines, I believe that overall it made me a better writer, as you said. In response to Kailyn's comment, our topics were also always assigned, so I was wondering what you chose to write your research papers about?
ReplyDelete